Power of Liquid Biopsy Tracking in Immunotherapy Treated Stage IV Melanoma

Get Involved

Power of Liquid Biopsy Tracking in Immunotherapy Treated Stage IV Melanoma

Study Purpose

The advent of immune ICI has remarkably improved survival in advanced melanoma patients in the last decade. Long term responders following 2 years of treatment with immunotherapy go on to surveillance with frequent radiological imaging every 3-6 months up to 5-10 years. This not only exposes patients with a relatively low risk of recurrence to significant amounts of ionising radiation, but also increases the burden and cost on already stretched radiology departments. Therefore, this study aims to assess the feasibility and patient experience of using ctDNA with minimally invasive liquid biopsy assays as a biomarker for detecting disease relapse or progression at the point of radiological progression. Data from this pilot study will help to design a future validation study for establishing optimal liquid biopsy for surveillance in advanced melanoma patients.

Recruitment Criteria

Accepts Healthy Volunteers Healthy volunteers are participants who do not have a disease or condition, or related conditions or symptoms	No
Study Type An interventional clinical study is where participants are assigned to receive one or more interventions (or no intervention) so that researchers can evaluate the effects of the interventions on biomedical or health-related outcomes. An observational clinical study is where participants identified as belonging to study groups are assessed for biomedical or health outcomes. Searching Both is inclusive of interventional and observational studies.	Observational [Patient Registry]
Eligible Ages	16 Years and Over
Gender	All

More Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

- Histologically proven melanoma.

- Unresectable stage III or stage IV disease, with confirmed radiological disease progression within 1 month of recruitment.

- Patient has received at least 1 cycle of immunotherapy with checkpoint inhibitors for melanoma.

- Undergoing standard of care active treatment with regular interval imaging or routine imaging surveillance following treatment completion/cessation.

- Age over 16.

- Not previously diagnosed with HIV, Hepatitis B or C (does not need testing)
Exclusion Criteria:
- Not on routine surveillance with interval imaging per standard of care.

- Unable to provide informed consent due to psychological, medical or cognitive conditions.

- Unable to comply with schedule of study samples to be collected.

Concurrent active malignancies needing treatment

Trial Details

Trial ID: This trial id was obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov, a service of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, providing information on publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants with locations in all 50 States and in 196 countries.	NCT06710093
Phase Phase 1: Studies that emphasize safety and how the drug is metabolized and excreted in humans. Phase 2: Studies that gather preliminary data on effectiveness (whether the drug works in people who have a certain disease or condition) and additional safety data. Phase 3: Studies that gather more information about safety and effectiveness by studying different populations and different dosages and by using the drug in combination with other drugs. Phase 4: Studies occurring after FDA has approved a drug for marketing, efficacy, or optimal use.
Lead Sponsor The sponsor is the organization or person who oversees the clinical study and is responsible for analyzing the study data.	Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust
Principal Investigator The person who is responsible for the scientific and technical direction of the entire clinical study.	N/A
Principal Investigator Affiliation	N/A
Agency Class Category of organization(s) involved as sponsor (and collaborator) supporting the trial.	Other
Overall Status	Not yet recruiting
Countries	United Kingdom
Conditions The disease, disorder, syndrome, illness, or injury that is being studied.	Metastatic Melanoma
Study Website:	View Trial Website

Additional Details

This prospective study will measure ctDNA in a simple plasma sample and using a dried blood spot assay, collected at the time of radiological disease progression. We will investigate the use of tumour informed and tumour naïve approaches, assessing targeted sequencing, copy number variations using whole genome low depth sequencing, fragmentomics and methylation as potential methods to improve molecular recurrence detection. We will also collect urine samples to investigate the use of cfDNA to detect relapse in the brain, which has been noted to be more challenging to detect using ctDNA in the blood than other sites of relapse. In addition, we will investigate the use of novel immunophenotyping technology through a collaboration with MelioHealth (IMU) in the same setting. The IMU platform combines high resolution cellular analysis and machine learning to enable high-content, high-throughput and real-time cellular immunophenotyping from less than 2ml of whole blood. We hypothesize that disease relapse following immunotherapy may detectably trigger a patient's immune system memory, which may be particularly important for those patients who do not shed ctDNA.

Arms & Interventions

Arms

: Histologically proven melanoma

Unresectable stage III or stage IV disease, with confirmed radiological disease progression within 1 month of recruitment

Interventions

Contact a Trial Team

If you are interested in learning more about this trial, find the trial site nearest to your location and contact the site coordinator via email or phone. We also strongly recommend that you consult with your healthcare provider about the trials that may interest you and refer to our terms of service below.